Marxist IQ: What’s the Leninist approach to elections?

1. In dealing with the question of how Marxists should respond to parliamentary elections, which in Czarist Russia were very limited by European or American standards, Lenin contended that:

a. Marxists should always participate in such elections as a matter of principle;
b. Marxists should always not participate in such elections as a matter of principle;
c. Marxists should evaluate each election and their role in it based on working class interests;
d. Marxists should raise money from the capitalists to fight the Czarist aristocracy.

2. Third party candidates have on three occasions helped to decide the presidential election in favor of one of the major party candidates. Which one of these third party candidates did not help decide the election for one of the major party candidates:

a. Liberty Party Candidate James Birney for Polk in 1844;
b. Progressive Party Candidate T.R. Roosevelt for Wilson in 1912;
c. Socialist Party Candidate Eugene Debs for Harding in 1920;
d. Green Party Candidate Ralph Nader for Bush in 2000;

3. While running their candidate Earl Browder, in 1936, the CPUSA, which had already built united front campaigns through the new CIO and National Negro Congress, distinguished between the major party candidates as follows:

a. Roosevelt was a great leader and Landon a boring little man;
b. Both Landon and Roosevelt were indistinguishable as big business spokesmen;
c. Beating Roosevelt and the New Deal which had won working class support was more important than beating Landon;
d. Roosevelt was carrying forward a positive reform program while Landon represented reactionary and fascistic big business interests.

4. In American presidential elections, the Electoral College serves as a:

a. Force to defend the integrity of elections;
b. A limitation on universal suffrage and the principle, “one person one vote”;
c. Proof that the original Constitution does not need amendments;
d. An institution which gives great power to scholars and intellectuals.

5. If American presidential elections were to conform to modern democratic standards they would have to:

a. Regulate and sharply limit the role of money in elections;
b. Provide protection and ballot status for minority parties in elections;
c. Abolish the Electoral College and institute a runoff when no candidate had a majority;
d. All of the above.

6. Many regard Donald Trump’s “election” to the Presidency as breaking all previous records of corruption in presidential elections because:

a. There was widespread voter suppression aimed at people of color and other likely anti-Trump voters;
b. The turnout of eligible voters, 57%, was the lowest in twenty years;
c. Agents of Russian oligarchs with organized crime connections used information leaks and hacking of email accounts to sabotage the Clinton campaign;
d. All of the above.

Author

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